It was the terminology he and his prisoner-of-war mates used regularly in reply to a question of where someone or something was or in this case, where they were being sent to; what they did know was the transport conditions were nothing short of 'hell'. Over several days the prisoners, now named - F Force, were cruelly manhandled and squeezed upright in suffocating rail wagons, confiscated from local rice farmers.

With fifty prisoners to a wagon, many of whom still had side effects of dysentery, and with no lavatories, men had to hang over the wagon sides when nature called; dignity was all but forgotten.

"It was to say the least difficult, and even more so when the wind blew from the wrong direction," George recalled.

"I was pleased my bowels were regular at the time, and I didn't have to 'hang out to dry'."

This journey into hell was marked with ongoing physical brutality from the Japanese which was only surpassed by the decline in the mental state of men who were already sick, depressed, hungry and dehydrated. On top of which they had to contend with the never-ending rain, made even more torturous with the never ending 'plop, plop, plop' of rain seeping through the rusted wagon covers.

The rail journey took five excruciating days northwards through rainforest before they were unceremoniously off-loaded (as George likened - to cattle) and then expected to march a further 200 miles (322kms) deeper into the virgin jungle border region of Thailand. The changing scenery of lush tropical vegetation covered mountains was in direct contrast to the various shades of brown of the undulating spinifex plains and the low Selwyn and Argylla Ranges of outback Queensland which George was all too familiar with.

Changi for all its faults would soon be recalled as 'not too bad', while Shimo Songkurai - the number one camp, was purgatory. The Japanese wasted no time in putting the POWs to work in erecting their own open-sided huts from the felled trees and fronds while two trenches further up the side of the hill were dug for latrines. And yet again as in Changi, the Japanese captors were little prepared to cater meals for their prisoners, rather the POWs were given rations of rice, as little as a daily handful per man, to be boiled in chilli water for flavour. Hunger dictated that audible reminiscences of home cooking were quickly silenced to memory. It was at Shimo Songkurai 'number one camp' that George was at his lowest, not suicidal, but rather like his fellow POWs, he thought there was no hope, giving way to short term belief that why bother trying when the odds were stacked against them surviving the new work and prison conditions.

"We forgot how to laugh, everyday was an ordeal," George later recalled.

"We were all terribly frightened, and with hard long hours of heavy work, coupled with a starvation diet, we saw countless fine young men die ugly, unnecessary deaths."

At least one good mate was essential to survival. As work on the railway continued, even the sick and frail were compelled to work the twelve or fourteen hours a day, heaving heavily rain-soaked logs into place as bridge pylons for the sequence of bridges needed to cross the mountain streams, leading to Hellfire Pass. George's biggest fear was not contracting cholera as expected, but tropical ulcers, particularly on his legs.

"Working as we did, in stinking mud most of the time, a small scratch from a sharp stone or bamboo could turn into an ulcer in a matter of hours; a strong pair of boots were worth a million."

He had seen too many legs be amputated without their owners' having benefit of any form of ether or pain killing drugs; the result being many those men died. George's vigilance of health issues was only surpassed by his mental aptitude to survive day after day, after day. Death was always close, at the hands of the guards, through starvation, beriberi, cholera, malaria or dysentery, suicide; death although a blight on the tropical landscape was considered an escape from hunger. And if death's door was ever present, then hunger was its door stop. The Japanese were not known for their largess in distributing Red Cross relief parcels, so prisoners had to rely on their own ingenuity of local 'bush tucker' to make the coolie rice gruel more palatable in the chilli water. And with only un- enriched white rice, low in thiamine, as the staple food, prisoners soon had to contend with beriberi and its inflection, 'rice balls' or scrotal dermatitis. George never admitted to having had 'rice balls' but very few prisoners escaped its painful and uncomfortable presence even when only wearing a cloth G-string style nappy which was de rigueur for the prisoners. But what he did proudly recall, and never forgot, was the comradeship amongst the prisoners as they each other for daily survival, not only of physical support but importantly psychological which was often the thin connection between life and death. During the eight months F Force built the Burma-Thailand Railway line, George never gave up hope even when he faced fear, the like of which he had never even dreamed.

Then one day in late November 1943, the Japanese told us, 'Work finish! All men sing!", he recalled. So, they all sang loudly as one voice - 'They'll be flying in formation when they come ... And there'll be f... all here to stop 'em ... When the bastards start to drop em.' With the completion of the railway, the surviving skeletal members of F Force were once again trucked, this time ironically along the very rail line, they had hand built, to Kamburi and beyond. Only now this time 'Godknowswhere' had a name - Changi Prison.

Researched and written by Kim-Maree Burton. Information sourced from George Beard's memoirs 'The Long, Long Road - Isa to the Burma Railway and Back', Anzac Portal and the Australian War Museum archives.